Hartford Hospital, in concert with the UConn School of Medicine, administers a monthly program called the Advanced Trauma Operative Management course (ATOM). ATOM includes a 3-hour lab session during which surgery trainees and practitioners pay $1,500 each to manage fourteen different traumatic injuries that are intentionally inflicted in live adult pigs. The animals must suffer through penetrating injuries such as stab wounds to numerous organs in the abdomen and chest, including the kidney, pancreas, stomach, diaphragm, and heart.

Hartford Hospital uses five pigs per month in this series of highly invasive surgical procedures. Those pigs who survive the traumas and surgeries are killed at the end of the exercises. According to documents obtained from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the facility regularly confines over 100 pigs for use in this program.

Justin Goodman, a local animal rights campaigner, stated, "Pigs are highly intelligent, sensitive individuals who are very easily stressed. Studies at US and UK universities show pigs to be more intelligent than three-year-old children. And confining, mutilating and killing them for these kinds of exercises is not only morally wrong, but scientifically unjustifiable. We want these exercises ended immediately."

He continued, "Regardless of how many pigs these doctors operate on, some human patient in the ER is still going to have to be their first. Why waste the state's resources and the lives of these animals training surgeons on anatomically incorrect models, especially when there are so many promising ethical alternatives that could be used instead?"

Added John Pippin, M.D., Senior Medical and Research Adviser for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine: "The surgery training paradigm has moved beyond the use of live animals. More than 95 percent of American medical schools have eliminated the use of animals to teach surgery skills, the majority of Advanced Trauma Life Support courses do not use animals, and the American College of Surgeons no longer uses animals in its own courses or in its revised surgery curriculum."

Goodman added, “An overwhelming majority of trauma surgeons worldwide have never conducted such barbaric exercises on nonhuman animals of any kind and the available research suggests that surgical knowledge and competency are not improved by doing so. In the interest of upholding their duty to practice ethical medicine, these doctors and researchers should be abandoning these superfluous animal studies in favor of pursuing human-relevant, humane alternatives," Goodman said.